by Joel Kotkin
Designed to be a great capital, Baghdad was constructed with a circular plan: wall, moat, and inner wall surrounding the palace.20 Its population, at least a quarter million inhabitants, dwarfed those of contemporary Venice, Paris, and Milan, then the leading cities of Europe, and equaled the last great redoubt of Greco-Roman civilization, Constantinople. By 900, it was likely the largest city in the world.21
In the ensuing centuries, the caliphate would shatter and Baghdad would lose its exclusive hold on political power. But still the city retained a notable intellectual productivity. Libraries and academies flourished, helped by the introduction of paper and the circulation of books, including translations of Western and Persian classics. Over time, Arab scholars developed thinner paper, making books more portable and easier to write.22
CAIRO’S GOLDEN AGE
The establishment of multiple Islamic capitals helped foster the creation of new centers in Spain, Persia, and especially Egypt. Founded in the tenth century, Cairo expanded over the ensuing three centuries from a courtly center of caliphal administration to a full-fledged cosmopolitan city. It became, as the historian Janet Abu-Lughod noted, “a metropolis inhabited by masters and masses alike.”23
By the time of ibn Battuta’s arrival, the city was under the rule of the Mamluks, a group of Turkish warrior-slaves who had seized it a century earlier. Grown to nearly five times its original walled area, Cairo had become an unsurpassed center of learning, with colleges, a library boasting more than 1.6 million books, and a major hospital. Its famous Citadel now towered over a sprawling giant of a city.24
Cairo controlled transcontinental markets as perhaps no city had done since the days of Rome. The Egyptian metropolis, ibn Battuta wrote, served as
mistress of broad provinces and fruitful lands, boundless in the profusions of its peoples, peerless in its beauty and splendor, she is the crossroads of travelers, the sojourn of the weak and powerful.25
The Qasaba of Cairo, with its hundreds of stores, its upper stories home to some 360 apartments, and a permanent population of roughly four thousand, formed the greatest of these bazaars. One contemporary Egyptian writer noted the astonishing “abundance and diversity of goods” and a deafening hubbub punctuated by “the cries of porters carrying merchandise and delivering it to river barges.”26
The Qasaba served as a critical terminus for Arab merchants who now dominated the great trade routes linking Africa, China, and India with the Mediterranean world. Porcelain, textiles, spices, and slaves flowed into ports such as Alexandria and down to Cairo. Many of the luxury items most coveted in Italy and the rest of Europe filtered through traders—Muslim, Jewish, or Christian—operating out of the city on the Nile.
In a manner seen under Sargon in ancient Mesopotamia and, later, Rome, this commercial vitality rested on a strong security regime. At a time when travel in Europe was exceedingly difficult and dangerous, a visitor like ibn Battuta to fourteenth-century Egypt could travel in safety, through a thoroughly urbanized, interconnected world:
There is no need for a traveler on the Nile to take any provisions with him, because whenever he wishes to descend on the bank he may do so, for ablutions, prayers, purchasing provisions, or any other purpose. There is a continuous series of bazaars from the city of Alexandria to Cairo .... 27
FROM NORTH AFRICA TO THE BORDERS OF CHINA
Islam’s rise also created the conditions for a widening archipelago of major trading centers dominated largely by Muslim merchants.28 Never before had one faith, or urban system, held such a wide sway. Dar al-Islam provided a common set of rules, modes of behavior, and cultural norms across myriad cities. Islamic regimes, for example, instituted a special office, known as a wakil al-tujjar, to supply legal representation and lodging to foreign merchants.29
These institutions spread well beyond Islam’s traditional heartland. By the thirteenth century, over thirty independent Islamic trading states, including Mombasa and Mogadishu, arose along the East African coast. Islam also flourished in West African commercial centers such as Kano and Timbuktu, where slaves and gold attracted merchants from across Dar al-Islam. Connected to Cairo by southerly trade routes, Timbuktu by the fourteenth century had grown into a city of fifty thousand.30
The Persians controlled the even richer trade routes to India and China.31 In cities such as Isfahan, Tabriz, and Shiraz, burgeoning transcontinental trade, supplemented by local industry, created sprawling bazaars that, along with the mosque, served as the central points of a renewed Iranian urbanism.32
By the fourteenth century, both Persian and Islamic cultural influence began to have an impact on nomadic groups such as the Turks and Mongols, whose conquests gave them control over cities in Central Asia and India. These centers had origins that often predated the Islamic conquests, but the new urbane religion sparked brilliant new varieties of city life.
INDIA’S ISLAMIC REBIRTH
India would emerge as a primary case in point. A major center of urban civilization during the Mauryan Empire between the fourth and second centuries B.C.,33 India would ultimately fall into a decline; with its urban centers largely atrophied, warring, competitive states wreaked havoc on one another, and long-distance trade suffered as a result.34
Equally critical, the Hindu-inspired caste system weakened India’s urban evolution by stigmatizing trade and depressing curiosity about the outside world. The eleventh-century Arab historian Alberuni observed:
The Indians believe that there is no country but theirs, no nation like theirs, no king like theirs, no religion like theirs. . . . They are by nature niggardly in communicating what they know, and take the greatest possible care to withhold it from men of another caste from among their own people, still more of course from any foreigner.35
The triumphant Muslim sultans, like their Arab predecessors in the Near East and North Africa, quickly reinvigorated India’s cities. They professionalized administration, improved roads, constructed inns for travelers, and encouraged trade links with the outside world. This boosted not only bustling trade cities, such as Cambay in Gujerat, but also the emerging administrative center of Delhi, a city conquered at the end of the twelfth century.
When ibn Battuta visited Delhi under the rule of the Muslim Tughluq dynasty, he encountered “a vast and magnificent city . . . the largest city in India, nay the largest of all the cities of Islam in the East.” The capital had developed a large marketplace and drew scholars, scientists, artists, and poets from throughout the Islamic world.36
Although the vast majority of Indians in the country remained Hindus, Muslims dominated urban centers throughout the subcontinent. Muslim traders, along with some Hindu merchants, managed profitable coastal trade routes between the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia.37
Large portions of India’s drugs, spices, luxury goods, and slaves also found their way to the coastal cities of China, where both Muslim merchants and missionaries had established a presence. Yet China was not destined to become part of the Muslim world. Instead, it represented a distinctly different center of urban civilization, one whose magnificence and power rivaled that of Dar al-Islam.
CHAPTER EIGHT
CITIES OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM
A century before ibn Battuta, a group of Venetian merchants traveled across the vastness of Central Asia to the East. Like their North African counterpart, the Polos found that most cities across these vast tracts followed the faith of Muhammad. It was only in Lop, today located in Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, that Islamic influence began to fade before more distinctly Chinese influence.1
Initially, the rise of Islam had represented something of a setback for China’s cities. Under the Han dynasty, which flourished at the time of the western Roman Empire, and again under the Tang in the seventh century, Chinese merchants had controlled the lucrative transcontinental trade route all the way to the edges of Afghanistan. Yet when confronted by Muslim forces in 751, the Chinese were decisively beaten.2
By the time the Polos arriv
ed in China, the loss of the far periphery was barely remembered, much less mourned. Unlike Islam, which sought to conquer and convert the world, China, noted the historian Bernard Lewis, lacked a powerful missionary zeal. China could slough off defeat in the far periphery, because as the great “Middle Kingdom” it remained largely economically self-sufficient and culturally self-contained.3
Chinese influence might, by example or conquest, extend to Korea, Japan, and Southeast Asia, but its culture lacked a transcendental set of values that non-Chinese could adopt. An individual could become a Muslim; it was not so easy to become truly Chinese, even if one occupied the throne of the Middle Kingdom.
URBAN TRADITION IN AN AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY
In powerful contrast with the city-centered Muslim culture, China’s cities arose within the framework of a predominantly agriculturally based civilization. Even as late as the sixteenth century, the Ming emperors continued to perform ritualistic fertility rites in a highly choreographed setting on the palace grounds.4
This enduring agrarian reality reflected itself even within the cities. Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Zhangzhou, and Beijing stood as arguably the world’s largest and best-planned cities, yet they did not differ so radically from the surrounding, often crowded countryside.5 China’s cities, despite achieving great size, constituted merely a “denser in quality” version of the greater agrarian reality.
China’s cities simply did not exercise the influence over the hinterland common in classical Europe or in the Islamic world. Even in the largest cities, most goods were produced primarily for local consumption; most rural needs were fulfilled at the village level. Despite having by far the world’s largest population, China was unable to achieve a comparable level of urbanization, as measured by percentage of people living in large cities; China remained less than half as urbanized as Western Europe, the Mediterranean, or, for that matter, Japan from the first millennium until the present day. 6
“THE ASTRAL CENTER OF THE UNIVERSAL ORDER”
China’s most important cities served primarily as administrative centers of the empire. The centers developed during the Zhou period in the first millennium B.C. set the prevailing pattern, with bureaucracy, priestly functions, and the military playing the leading roles. Craft and commercial activities evolved to serve the ruling elites but generally played a secondary role. 7
Politics, not commerce, propelled the fates of China’s cities. 8 The urban fortunes of Chang’an, Loyang, Kaifeng, Nanjing, and Beijing tended to wax and wane based on the locational preferences of dynasties. Issues such as the need for forward defense or access to food supplies largely determined which city or cities would serve as capital.9
A shift of capital, and with it the massive weight of the governmental apparatus, was enough by itself to spur a burgeoning marketplace economy. The East Market at Chang’an under the Tang dynasty in the late first millennium A.D. boasted “two hundred streets and alleyways, each surrounded on the four sides with warehouses filled with rare and curious goods from the whole country.” As in the Greek agora or Roman Forum, these places became natural settings for their services, including those of printers, entertainers, butchers, and cloth dealers.
City life was highly regulated by imperial bureaucracy. Market times and curfews were announced by the banging of drums.10 When it came time to lay out a new capital or restore a former one, great priority was placed on following the precepts in the Zhou Li, the ancient Chinese protocol governing the way of life, personal conduct, and relationships among things. Each great capital, notes the historian Heng Chye Kiang, was laid out by a formula, surrounded by walls, with strict grid systems, market districts, and an exclusive, virtually self-sufficient district entirely for the emperor, chief ministers, and others connected to the imperial household.11
The need to separate the imperial household from the outside world dominated the planning process. The imperial city was cut off from its surroundings by high walls; it did not so much look down upon the surrounding areas, which would be common in Europe or the Near East, as away from them. Military forces, needed to protect the imperial family, often constituted a large proportion of the city’s population; one Chinese scholar estimates that as many as one in five residents around the Sung capital of Kaifeng after A.D. 1000 was associated with the armed forces and other parts of the security apparatus. 12
Some dynasties constructed more than one such capital to administer their domains. The Sui dynasty established three capitals and connected them by roads, canals, and imperial resting pavilions. Sui Wen-ti, who founded the dynasty in A.D. 581, started the Grand Canal to ensure food supplies for the traditional capital of Chang’an, a city that soon grew to rival the size of any contemporary city, including Constantinople.13
Beyond the capital cities lay a vast network of smaller centers. In the third century B.C., Shih Huang-ti, the first emperor to unite China, divided the formerly independent Chinese states into provinces, or zhou, each with its own administrative center. Below these developed a vast archipelago of smaller administrative districts, or hsien. These centers not only secured the empire, but also dispersed food during famine and provided for the sick and aged.14
Yet Chinese urbanism centered mostly on its great capitals. These were not merely cities of earthly power under Confucian traditions; they also served as “the astral center of the universal order,” the central point of the Middle Kingdom.15 As centers of veneration, they resembled Islam’s holy places, such as Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem, but with a distinctly different emphasis. The Muslim holy places were sacred but, after the first century of Islamic history, no longer seats of political power. In China, power and divinity shifted in tandem; where the emperor resided, there was the sacred place.
“GREAT CLOUDS IN THE SKY”
By the end of the first millennium A.D. and in the ensuing centuries, there emerged in China another kind of metropolis, one based primarily not on political power, but on mercantile values. The first flowering of commercial cities took place under the Tang dynasty, which ruled China from A.D. 618 to 907. By loosening traditional restrictions on trade, most importantly in land, the Tang helped create a new, potentially powerful class of urban proprietors. The commercial pace hastened under the Sung, who took power in 960 and encouraged the growth of trade.
For the first time, China emerged as a transcontinental trading power. After sweeping Japanese and other pirates from the seas, Chinese merchants established a dominating role over trade routes all the way to India. Chinese navigators were the world’s most accomplished, learning the use of the compass, and mapped the seas to as far as the Cape of Good Hope.
By the twelfth century, the Chinese fleet grew to twenty squadrons and over fifty-two thousand men. Chinese economic, cultural, and political influence now spread to a vast expanse of Asia, including Korea, Japan, and much of Southeast Asia.16 Some of their vessels could carry upwards of five hundred people and store a year’s supply of food. Pigs were bred on ships and wine brewed. “The ships that sail the southern seas,” wrote the traveler Chou Ch’u-fei, “are like houses. When their sails are spread they are like great clouds in the sky.” 17
The growth of transoceanic business greatly stimulated the development of commercially oriented cosmopolitan cities. A flourishing city by 100 B.C., Guangzhou by the eighth century A.D. had become home to its own powerful Muslim trade community. The Sung established their first customs office there in 971, and for the next century, the port city enjoyed a veritable monopoly of foreign trade. By 1200, Guangzhou’s population had grown to more than two hundred thousand, ranking it among the world’s four or five largest cities. 18
Marco Polo marveled at the vast quantity and diversity of the burgeoning urban economy. For every ship that arrived in Alexandria or any Italian port with spices, the Venetian traveler estimated, “a hundred” arrived in Zhangzhou, which had emerged as China’s premier port for trading with South Asia. Spices, drugs, gems, and the handiwork of the Near East, India,
and Southeast Asia poured from the piers into the warehouses of Chinese cities. These, in turn, exported China’s crafts products, technology, and silk. 19
This represented a potentially auspicious new beginning for Chinese urban history. In the early centuries of the first millennium, rising cities such as Guangzhou, Fuzhou, and Zhangzhou displayed the cosmopolitan mixture then seen in Alexandria, Cairo, Antioch, or Venice. Arab and Jewish traders, living under imperial protection in fan-fang, or foreign quarters, were particularly active; a broad diversity of ideas created a fertile artistic, scientific, and creative climate.20
These coastal cities attached themselves as well to the strong national internal trade network, most notably in the Sung capital of Kaifeng. The streets beyond the Palace City were “dense as fish scales,” lined with bustling shops, drinking houses, and brothels. Significant colonies of Muslims and Jews also settled in the capital. The relaxation of some traditional restrictions of business, such as strict curfews, encouraged the development of a genuine “urban culture,” with two- or three-story commercial buildings, lively popular literature, and various kinds of popular entertainment. 21
The Mongol seizure of China in the early thirteenth century, much lamented by nationalistic Chinese, nevertheless accelerated these trends. With a vast empire in their control, the Mongols extended China’s influence across Asia to the edges of Europe. In foreign cities under Mongol control, such as Moscow, Novgorod, and Tabriz, significant Chinese colonies now appeared for the first time.
